She did it first in 2001, when she was 15, at a summer program with Dance Theatre of Harlem in New York. The company said her shoes needed to be brown, not the traditional pink, but she could not find any in stores, so she used spray paint. “It made them crunchy and just … ew,” she said in a telephone interview.

When she joined Dance Theatre a few years later, she started using makeup instead. “I’d go to the cheapest stores and get foundation,” she said, the kind “you’d never put on your face as it’d break you out. Like, $2.95 cheap.”

She would go through five tubes a week, sponging it onto 12 to 15 pairs of shoes — a process known in ballet circles as pancaking. It took 45 minutes to an hour to do a pair, she said, because she wanted to make sure the foundation got into every crevice and covered every bit of ribbon.

But now, Robinson — a senior artist at Ballet Black, a British dance company — is no longer obliged to do so. In October, Freed of London, which supplies her shoes, started selling two point shoes specifically for dancers of color: One brown, the other bronze.

Freed is not the first firm to make point shoes for dancers of color — the U.S. company Gaynor Minden has been producing some more than a year — but the new shoes from Freed, a large supplier in the ballet world, highlight one of the stranger rituals that dancers of color have to perform.

It is also a reminder that black dancers — especially female ones — are a rarity in ballet. They remain barely represented at the top of the field, despite some signs of change and an increased awareness of the need for diversity at the schools feeding professional companies.

Shoes are not the only costuming reminders of the lack of diversity in ballet. In September, Precious Adams, a first artist at English National Ballet, raised the issue of pink tights. “In ballet people have very strong ideas about tradition,” she told London’s Evening Standard newspaper. “They think me wearing brown tights in a tutu is somehow ‘incorrect.'”

“But I want to look my best on stage. I’m not colorblind, and I think it ruins the line of my body.”

“但我想在舞台上展现最佳状态。我不是色盲，我觉得粉色裤袜会破坏我的身体线条。”

Dancers, though, cannot do whatever they like, Adams added. Directors decide on outfits. And often uniformity is a goal.

然而亚当斯也说，舞者们不能随心所欲。她们穿什么服装由导演决定。往往需要保持统一。

Dancers in the corps, particularly, have to blend in with the group. Robinson of Ballet Black said dancers of color cannot always wear flesh-colored shoes or tights, if it would make them stand out.

群舞里的舞者尤其需要融入集体。黑色芭蕾的鲁滨逊说，如果会让她们显得很突出的话，有色人种舞者不能总是穿肤色鞋子或连裤袜。

She said she had seen a soloist at the English National Ballet wear brown tights and shoes, when everyone else was in pink — “but she was a soloist.” (It works differently at Dance Theatre of Harlem and Ballet Black, which are predominantly made up of people of color.)

“We want to shake up tradition a bit,” Robinson said, “but some things you can’t.”

“我们想多少改变一点传统，”鲁滨逊说，“但有些东西改变不了。”

Still, the new shoes have been welcomed. “This isn’t about shoes, this is about who belongs in ballet and who doesn’t,” said Virginia Johnson, artistic director of Dance Theatre, in a phone interview. “It’s a signal that the world is open to you.”

Johnson said she wore pink shoes when she started dancing in the 1950s and thought nothing of it until the ‘70s when Arthur Mitchell, a founder of Dance Theatre, decided his dancers should wear shoes and tights to match their skin. Johnson then started using makeup to paint her shoes.

“It was quite wonderful to be onstage and just to be myself, 100 percent the color I was,” she said, “one line, one shape, a color that has integrity.”

“在台上只做自己、100%展现出我自己的肤色很棒，”她说。“一个线条，一个形状，一种忠实的颜色。”

She recalled that Capezio supplied brown shoes for Dance Theatre for a short time, and at one point later the company’s dancers dyed their shoes with a product meant for bridal pumps. “Evangeline Shoe Dye,” Johnson said. “I haven’t thought about that name in years.” But since 2012, most members paint their shoes with acrylic paint, Johnson said. Dance Theatre’s wardrobe master mixes paint to match each dancer’s skin tone.

“A lot of people complain: It’s a long process, and it’s expensive,” Silva said. “The brand I use — Black Opal’s ebony brown — is $11 a bottle, and with that I can do three shoes.” She goes through an average of two pairs of shoes a week, meaning she used to spend $770 a year on makeup for shoes, a significant sum given dancers’ low pay. (Black Opal recently started supplying her free of charge.)

Silva, who is from Brazil, said the new shoes for dancers of color were a positive development, but more tones were needed. She cannot use the Freed shoes because they are not her color or style, she said. This echoes calls in the beauty world for wider ranges of foundation to reflect skin tones. (Last year, Rihanna introduced Fenty Beauty, a makeup line that offers 40 foundation colors, to meet that demand).